Aroma
How to smell like Jesus and grace
Do you have favorite aromas? I think we all do. I love the smell of coffee brewing when I'm still snuggled under the blankets. I love bacon on a cold morning. I love the smell of Christmas trees. I like the smell of eucalyptus trees on a foggy wet morning when they release their almost minty pungent fragrance.
Smells can captivate us and also warn us like, burnt food or a fire approaching. Aromas are really amazing things because they remind us of people, places and events. Some of them good, some of them not so good. Today we're going to talk about aromas and how do we smell to others? How do we smell to God? What fragrance do we give off to God?
When it comes to favorite fragrances, I love the smell of lilacs. They remind me of walking to my piano teacher’s house in the springtime in Wisconsin. And when I get to her house this huge bush with its lavender blossoms is drooping over the fence and I bury my nose into it's cool, fragrant flowers and it's just incredible to me. So when I smell lilacs it's like inhaling springtime in the Midwest.
To smell is to inhabit and inhale history. Of all the senses smell, and its kissing cousin taste has a direct route to emotion and memory in our brain. Our other senses like seeing hearing touching they travel through the thalamus in our brain. This is like a gate to our consciousness.
Have you ever noticed how if you're reading an article and somebody speaks to you, you can't hear them? That's because your thalamus is deciding which sense is going to overrule your hearing or your sight same with kids if they're watching TV and you speak to them. They cannot hear you. You have to say, “Look at Mommy's face.” And then the thalamus is telling their brains, okay what she's saying is more important than what you're hearing on the device.
After the thalamus decides what to do with the sensory input, it sends it to another area of the brain to be processed. But when we smell something, the thalamus doesn't get invited to the party. When the molecules of lilacs are washing over our olfactory receptors, that information bypasses the thalamus and goes right through our limbic system the area responsible for emotion and memory. This is why when you smell something, it takes you right back to an event or a time and can stir up an immediate emotion.
The briny tang of ocean breezes sends me back to when I first smelled it in high school. We were on a spring field trip and our bus made the long journey from Wisconsin to Florida as we came closer to the ocean. We lowered our windows and we stuck our heads out like eager inquisitive dogs sniffing the unfamiliar sea air.
The unique smell of piñon wood this reminds me of the time we visited relatives in the southwest and watched a neon orange and purple sunset. They had a crackling fire of these particular logs welcoming us with their unique aromatic scent.
When I smell gingersnaps baking it is Christmas time. I'm 10 years old and I've come in from ice-skating outside. I drop my snow encrusted mittens hat and boots by the back door and enter the warm embrace of the kitchen. The smell of gingersnaps means home, mother, Christmas, and love. My son loves these cookies so much, he wants me to make them year-round, but I am hesitant. I don't want to dull or muddy the association I have with this particular scent memory. It's nonsensical and silly, but there it is.
Even years after my mother died, I pull out a scarf that had been hers and the scent of her wafts around my closet and it makes tears spring to my eyes. It's as if she's right here, caressing my neck with love and Arpege™ perfume.
Aromas don't always have a good association. For a while after our dog died, rats were attracted to our apple tree in the backyard. So no longer deterred by our feisty Bichon, they would help themselves to the apples and then die underneath the house. I think maybe they got too fat to crawl back out.
So until the rodent removal service could get to our home, I burned scented candles. Years later those same lovely scents trigger a gag reflex in me. They bring back that pungent stink of decaying rodents that I tried to mask. When somebody says, “I smell a rat,” that has an indelible meaning for me now because I know what a dead rat smells like.
My friend Sophia is from South America. While I gratefully inhale the pungent exotic fragrance of those tuberose blossoms, to her, they are repellent. They remind her of sad funerals when she was growing up. So scent, combined with experience, gives us the memory stamp our brain recalls.
I have favorite aromas and you probably do too. To me, happy smells are fresh ground coffee, summer rain on hot pavement, fresh earth turned over in the spring, just cut grass, fall leaves burning, popcorn, swimsuits pungent with lake water, eucalyptus trees in heavy fog, bacon on a cold morning, and the top of a baby's head and many others scent markers speak to me of love and memory.
Gardeners know that certain herbs and plants have terrific scent that will perfume the garden and evoke memory. Some of my favorite plants for great scents are: tuberoses, gardenias, pink Jasmine, honeysuckle, orange blossoms, oriental lilies, rosemary, thyme, and bay laurel. Recently, rose suppliers have started breeding scent back into the roses. And this has been lost over the years of perfection trying to get the perfect tea rose form and now they're trying to breed these old-fashioned roses that have intense fragrance. David Austin is an English breeder of old-fashioned roses and you should look him up because he creates amazing roses and my favorite is the apricot pink one called, Abraham Darby.
You can see my favorite rose—Abraham Darby, pictured above at Heritage Roses website.
A scent cannot only delight us and send us back in time, it can also save our lives. The ability to smell food that has gone bad or a gas stove that has been left on is integral to living long and prospering. Bloodhounds are unique in that regard. Most dogs have this incredible sense of smell and possess many more olfactory senses than humans do, but Bloodhounds have more olfactory receptors than your average dog. They are unique. In fact, if you lose a child or a pet, go find somebody that has a bloodhound trained to track children or pets. They are amazing in their ability to find people and pets because a bloodhound gets this photographic memory of a scent—and it doesn't matter if a hundred people have walked over the trail or even if it's rained, blood hounds have been known to find people days later and after hundreds of people have crisscrossed the trail. There have been famous accounts of bloodhounds finding families that have been lost and children found and I talk about this in my book This Outside Life if you want to learn more (Aroma chapter).
It's just so unique about what Bloodhounds can do with their olfactory senses. So since can trigger memories and they can trigger danger or whether we are lost or found. And in the book of 2 Corinthians in the Bible, the Apostle Paul talks about this when he talks about a Roman military Triumph. He says,
“But thanks be to God who always leads us in triumph in Christ, and manifests through us the sweet aroma of the knowledge of Him in every place. For we are fragrance of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing; to the one were an aroma of from death to death, to the other an aroma from life to life.”
This passage sounds really bizarre, unless you understand what a Roman Triumph is. And since Paul was in Rome a lot, he would have seen some of these. So a Roman Triumph, it's just a fancy word for parade. And it would take place if they had sacked the city or taken over a certain area.
They would have a parade through the city called a Triumph. First in the parade would be the vanquished captives in chains and they are destined for death. Then would come the spoils of war—gold, silver, armor and statues. Then you'd have the Roman senators, officials, the generals, bodyguards and following them would be the purple robed general wearing a laurel wreath and riding on a chariot. He was the focus of the procession. Behind the general would come his adult children and then the conquering soldiers.
All along the triumphant procession would be strewn flowers and the smell of incense from burning altars everywhere along the route. So, to the conquerors that aroma of incense would signify victory and celebration. To the captured in chains, it was the smell of death. Because once the procession had completed its route, the captured were immediately put to death.
So Paul is saying in effect that living out our lives as followers of Jesus will cause an aroma to emanate off us. To one group, it will be repugnant a smell of loss and death. To another group his victory over sin and death and new life for believers will be the aroma of triumph and being found.
And you know what? It's bizarre when you see this play out in your own life. I had somebody turn to me once during a ski trip planning session with girlfriends from work.
She said, “Are you going to bring any of your goody two-shoe Church Ladies along on this trip?”
And I was so shocked. I was like, well, first of all, none of them are “goody two-shoes.” Some of them are dealing with sex addiction, one had former incestuous relationships, and several are reeling from alcoholic parents. So no, they're not “goody two-shoe church ladies.” And the other thing, I've never talked to her about my Bible study. So why would she say that? (And besides, do you think that's going to affect our skiing?) I mean, it was just bizarre. It wasn't till later that I found out her brother-in-law had been accidentally murdered in a drive-by shooting.
Then I realized, oh, okay. She blames God and since she smells that aroma off me, to her it’s repugnant. She's angry at God and to her it's horrible. She doesn't want anything to do with him.
The opposite example of this is a woman who used to work for my husband Tom. She was a former nun. I think she was still a practicing nun, but he was running a Silicon Valley startup and it was real busy. And somebody said, “Oh you should hire Maria Missoni,” and he thought, I don't think a nun is the right person to work in a Silicon Valley startup! But he hired her and Maria Missoni was a Spitfire. I think she was barely 5 feet tall, but she regularly beat the pants off these six-foot-something engineers at ping-pong and there was always a line outside her door of people wanting to talk to her because she was kind and loving and encouraging. And so her aroma was so attractive to people.
We want people to say when they meet us, “I've just been with Jesus! Instead of, “Good Lord who had just been with!?”
To be around Jesus was to inhale the fragrance of life in its fullness. He exuded a pleasing aroma when he turned water into wine at the wedding party. To the host and his mother, He was the aroma of compassion.
When he called on the shunned tax collector Zacchaeus out of the tree and offered to have dinner with him? He was the aroma of inclusion.
When he healed the leper, the blind, and the crippled, He was the aroma of mercy.
When he cried at the death of Lazarus, He was the aroma of empathy.
When he hung out with sinners, He was the aroma of fellowship.
And when he hung on the cross, he was the aroma of love.
After the resurrection when he gave Peter the responsibility to “feed my lambs” despite Peter having denied him, He was the aroma of forgiveness.
When we follow in Jesus’ footsteps and show compassion, inclusion, mercy, empathy, fellowship, love, and forgiveness? We are “the sweet aroma of the knowledge of Him in every place.” And that fragrance can be so compelling, it draws people and changes lives. Just like that sweet little nun who used to work for my husband.
We don't have to be a nun or corporate CEO to make a difference and to love people. By welcoming those who feel excluded or being an empathetic listening ear, a merciful parent, or just a joyful ping-pong player, we can exude the fragrance of Christ wherever we are. It will draw hearts closer, open up relationships more quickly, and change lives more powerfully than any finger-wagging can.
Even when people betray us, we can emanate the fragrance of forgiveness. We can spread the beguiling aroma of the kinship of Jesus.
The most captivating perfume in the world is the fragrance of Christ. Even when it doesn't make sense, we can make perfect scents. When we pour ourselves out as a fragrant offering in love and service to others, we leave a lasting memory of the pleasing aroma of Christ.
And that's a scent to die for.